Woodward sequester report hangs over Obama as cuts near

President Barack Obama will be out of Washington on Tuesday, but reporting by the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward pinning responsibility for the so-called sequester on Obama’s White House will follow the president and keep the onus on the commander in chief to explain the pending cuts.

With three full days before the onset of $85 billion in automatic, across-the-board budget cuts, conservatives are rallying around a Feb. 22 op-ed by the legendary reporter that says: “the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of [former Obama chief of staff Jack] Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.”

Woodward is using reporting from his 2012 book, “The Price of Politics” an inside look at how Washington leaders tried to improve both the U.S. economy and the country’s finances.

This matters for a few reasons, the main one being that Obama himself earlier said: “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed.” He said at the third presidential debate last fall, “It is something that Congress has proposed.”

So Republicans have the satisfaction of blaming Obama for the cuts, which look like they’re going to go into effect as scheduled on Friday, if only temporarily. That gives them a handy weapon in the court of public opinion.

Meanwhile, as much as they might savor blaming Obama, Republicans don’t appear to be lining up to block Lew’s nomination to be Treasury secretary. The Senate Finance Committee voted earlier on Tuesday to approve Lew’s nomination.